Darshita (Dipa) Shah, Ph.D.

Dipa’s primary role at TLL is to support educational efforts on campus by partnering with MIT educators (teaching assistants, instructors, and faculty) who wish to enhance their classroom practice, design new curricular materials, re-design existing material, and/or implement modern pedagogies in their classroom.

Her interests include how to best design student-centered instructional materials for different learning contexts (K12, higher education, formal, informal, open) using research-based principles and evaluation and assessment data. Much of her work has focused on the development of print-based and video-based instructional materials for formal K12 and higher ed contexts.

Dipa is also interested in the development of processes and technological tools to facilitate curriculum design and redesign at the class or program levels.

Before joining TLL, Dipa played an integral role in developing curriculum materials at the Museum of Science in Boston. Engineering is Elementary®, used by tens of thousands of teachers nationwide, is a research-based curriculum that reinforces elementary science topics, creativity, problem solving, and teamwork skills through hands-on engineering design challenges.

Dipa previously served as a member of the education staff at The Discovery Museum and Planetarium in Bridgeport, Connecticut. There, she trained and supervised science instructors, developed and taught hands-on physical science labs for Grades 3-8 in the museum and in after-school programs, and managed various grant-funded projects.

Dipa received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from North Carolina State University and her Ph.D. in Chemical and Biological Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her doctoral research focused on the development of polymeric biomaterials for heart valve tissue engineering.

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